I smile awkwardly.“Sorry.”
“Your wound is all healed,” she marvels, taking her hand away.“You went to the nurse?”
“I got someone to heal me,” I tell her.
“They did a marvelous job,” she muses.Then she opens the door wider.“Here, why don’t you come inside?We can have a chat.Get to know each other a little better.”She gives me a sly smile.“I’ll let you try a cigarette.”
Even though it sounds really lovely to sit with her and watch her smoke cigarettes and talk about her travels and her life, my mind can’t sit still.
“I have to go, but I would love to visit with you another time,” I tell her.
“Of course,” she says.“I’ll see you in class.Take care of yourself, all right?”
I promise I will and as she shuts the door, I hear heavy steps down at the mezzanine and my skin prickles with goose bumps at the sound of his distinctive gait.
I hurry around the corner to see Crane striding toward his wing.
“Crane!”I whisper as loud as I can, and as he turns I start running toward him.
At first his face lights up when he sees me, like he has candles within him, but the closer I get something inside him shifts, an awareness, and he’s taking a step back from me.Perhaps I am being a little too bold in my approach.
“Kat,” he says, my name sounding caught in his throat.Hereaches out and takes my hand, giving it a squeeze before quickly dropping it.“I don’t think you should be here.”
“Why not?”I ask.“I need to talk to you.”
It’s then that I notice his face looks a little beat up, a bruise at his jaw and his cheekbone.“What happened to you, are you okay?”
I reach up to touch him but he moves his face out of the way.
“Clearly I’m fine,” he says, giving me a quick smile.“Just a little scuffle with Brom, nothing out of the ordinary.”
“Is Brom okay?”
“He’s more than fine,” he says with a private smile.
“Well, I still need to talk to you.”
He looks around him, even though the hall is empty.“And I need to talk to you but now is not the time.”He pauses.“At the moment, for now, I can’t be seen with you.”
It feels like he’s kicked me in the ribs and my breath hitches.“Why not?”
“Because I’ll get fired if I’m with you, Kat,” he says, and the admission stuns me.“And while I’m prepared to lose my job for you, just…I need time to figure this out.”
“Fired?What happened?”Oh God.“Do you not want to be with me anymore?”
I hate how pathetic I sound, how quickly my lip pouts, how the tears rush to my eyes without warning.
“Oh, heavens, myvlinder,” he says, his expression crumbling as he cups my face in his warm hands, a single tear rolling down my cheek.He stares down at me with burning intensity that I feel in my toes.“I want to be with you every single moment of every day.You’re all I think about, all I dream about, all I want,and I promise you, I promise you, nothing is going to stand in the way of that.Everything I am doing, I am doing for you, Kat.I’m doing it for us.”
He slowly runs his thumb over my cheek, wiping away the tear as his eyes trail over my face.“But for now, we need to meet in secret.Just like before.We were getting careless and now we can’t afford to be.”
I feel slightly more assured, enough to let out a deep breath.“Who told you they would fire you?”
“Your aunt Leona.”
“Really?Because I just saw Sister Sophie here.She was knocking on your door.Wanted to talk to you about something.”
He sighs, letting go of my face, and it feels so cold without his contact.He runs a hand through his hair.“She probably wanted to tell me the same thing that Leona did.”
